A Winter's Tale
by FeelsSoReal
Summary: With the world laid to waste, Melisandre is at last compelled to confront the Great Other.
1. Chapter 1

Each step was an assault on the snow, a steady press through the hip-high fluff.

She did not leave footprints so much as a deep gash, black and shadowed in the dull blue mountainside. The moon, or what was left of it, struggled behind a choking net of clouds, even its frail light denied to the mountain below.

Some thirty leagues from the wall, from the wildlings, from any life at all, Melisandre trudged, uphill, snow melting with every step, freezing again in her wake. Even the Others shunned this place, though whether from fear or reverence, she did not know.

Only her heart, beating fierce and afraid, carried the fire of life in this lonely place. The one who waited knew nothing of warmth.

Up she climbed, step by step, pulse by pulse, the silent drum of war pounding in her chest, war against the enemy, against the endless winter whose icy claws were bit by bit raking all life from the world. The one who brought the winter waited ahead.

The night was dark, and full of terror, and Melisandre was afraid.

Then the moon struggled free from its bonds, and she saw it, not a quarter league off.

The citadel of the enemy loomed large on a clifftop, a palace wrought not of stone and sweat, but of ice, ice that obeyed and twisted into impossible towers, massive turrets, queer minarets clawing at the sky.

She stopped in her tracks, conviction wavering in the face of that monstrosity. In her moment of doubt, she felt an icy intelligence press its way through her skin, tighten its grip around her heart. She fell forward into the snow's soft embrace, testing her weakness, testing her resolve. She felt the call of the dark and the cold, and closed her eyes...

The choker round her throat blazed bright, red gold searing her skin, and her cry of pain pierced the silent skies. Slowly, she stood. R'hllor had chosen her for this task, and so on she went, watching the castle all the while, hating its unreal, alien beauty. This is what wants to replace us, what will spread across the world should I fail. This queer un-life, impossibly high crystal cities of ice and light, inhabited by the cold bodies of the Others, bodies which not so much live as are _animated_, made to move by the enemy's unknowable strength. There could be no failure. Death, death was acceptable, even welcome. Failure was not.

Movement, on a balcony. Again, her heart nearly froze. The dark shape of the enemy stood there, watching her, silent. The castle had no gate, no doors, just a great open maw, a deep slit in the ice through which giants might ride mammoths without hoping to touch the top.

Melisandre made her way toward that opening, and did not falter, even when the snow gave way to perfectly smooth slabs of ice, leading up and up into that terrible place.

She passed through the threshold, into the frozen heart of the great enemy, blind in the darkness, mind retreating behind her body, praying, hoping for some signal or sign. Around her, human forms seemed to flicker in the half-light. Above, she felt the enemy move.

She suddenly stopped, as if by instinct, and spread her arms, scattering powder that caught flame as it fell, a semicircle of fire lighting the atrium, the impossible chandelier, spears of colored ice, a hundred icy statues, and Her.

The other, the Great Other, the enemy whose name must not be spoken, stood not ten strides off, skin pale as snow, hair golden-white, eyes blue and piercing as the crystal citadel itself. Melisandre nearly laughed. She'd never imagined the enemy would be wearing a dress, and an elaborate one at that. Perhaps she was not the enemy, only his emissary, as Melisandre was R'hllor's. Regardless, she had to be destroyed.

And yet, neither woman moved.

The wind whined. Melisandre's heart beat a steady march. The ruby at her throat began to glow, its heat warming her, scorching her, a delicious pain confirming that she yet lived.

"You've come to end the long winter?" The voice was bright, melodious, deep, and full of sorrow.

Melisandre said nothing, heat coursing through her fingertips, pumping through her body, preparing itself.

"Winter is mute. May we speak, before you do what must be done? Words crack the ice and herald spring."

Melisandre's skin was steaming, her body glowing, though the flames around her were dying down. "Who are the girls?" she asked, gesturing to the statues that filled the hall.

The enemy grinned a wicked, bitter grin. "Sisters. I killed them both, a long time ago."

The icy statues stood in pairs, the same scenes over and over, two children smiling, laughing, rolling balls of snow. Was this a trick, or some vestigial humanity? "You have murdered uncounted thousands. Why remember them?"

The enemy frowned. "The past is in the past, yet those days and those dead always remain with us. Guilt reigns forever."

Melisandre sneered. "Where I'm from, we burn the dead."

The enemy looked at her with something like pity. "These girls' hearts were frozen, their bodies entombed in ice. First one, and soon after, the other. They loved each other dearly, but because of me they will remain separate for all time." She cocked her head to one side, and smiled knowingly. "Do you like my tomb?"

Melisandre's hands began to smoke, and she stepped forward.

"Not yet." The enemy held up one hand, and Melisandre felt the heat wicking from her ruby, from her hands, her heart. "I'm the murderer. Out here, I decide when I die."

But Melisandre did not stop, took one step and another, each more difficult than the last, like pushing through six feet of snow and ice.

"Don't come any closer." Her voice was grating, and the walls of the palace echoed with icy groans.

Melisandre took another step. She reached out, to do what must be done.

"Don't!" There was fear in the enemy's eyes, and something else. She stepped back, but Melisandre leapt at her, knocking her to the ground. "No!"

The anguished cry rang throughout the empty chamber, for Melisandre was frozen solid, ice spreading across her body, till her eyes widened and her ruby cracked.

Black smoke rose from the splintered jewel, a few wisps, then nothing.

Elsa put her head in her hands and wept.


	2. Chapter 2

How many years, or weeks, or hours passed before they moved once more?

Elsa, rimed with a light layer of frost, stirred from her stupor and stood. Emotionlessly, she inspected this new statue: a woman, no, hardly a woman, a girl, reaching out in madness and desperation, frozen solid in the moment that she reached her uncertain goal. She was strangely beautiful, features confident, eyes fierce with determination, yet wide with fear. And she was the only statue in the chamber which wasn't truly ice.

It had been so long since she'd seen anyone, anyone outside of her memories. But then time meant nothing in this place.

She paced through her statue garden, repeating the mantra which had steered her life since childhood, the mantra her father had taught her in a desperate attempt to suppress the guilt of an accidental death.

She stared into the icy eyes of a laughing statue, a girl with snowball in hand, not knowing if what moved her now were true memories, or the stories she'd learned to tell herself in the years after.

_White lips, white eyes, white hair in her hands as she clung to the body of her sister, swinging fists at an insistent father, screaming, hurling childish obscenities at the sad faces of the trolls, those inscrutable creatures who had told her family no, they could not heal a frozen heart._

She had never wanted to kill; she'd only wanted to be left alone, but the world would not forget. Armies sought her out of hate and fear, armies that only made her and the world colder, armies of Starks, Hornewoods, Umbers, Pooles, Westerguards, Mormonts and Pevensies, Baratheons and Fitzherberts, hordes out of Arendelle, Winterfell, Cair Paravel. All their banners, their lions and wolves and bears, frozen in the wastes.

She laughed, bitterly, at the lion who had promised resurrection, for his failed and frozen army had risen again in truth. Was it the work of the White Walkers who worshipped her from afar, or her own dark powers that had animated their corpses into cold-eyed snow men?

Whatever the cause, the northern wastes now boasted great stretches of snow more red than white, wastes the color of Anna's hair.

So strange that this woman should look so much like her. The same red hair, long and braided, like iron and fire, woven heartstrings, now changed to blue ice. What a woman her sister might have grown to be, much like this intruder, with a face and figure to charm any who saw her.

For the first time in forever, she had felt another's touch. Was it warmth she felt before the woman froze? Elsa stared at her hands, her icy claws. Monster.

Only a monster makes life from death. She'd only wanted to bring back her sister, but Anna's body had long since been stolen from its frozen tomb. So now, out here, nothing would ever truly die.

She herself had lived too long, and waited only to be destroyed. Melted at last, changed into a puddle of water. Was this the woman to do it, to rid the world of the witch queen of the north?

She tried something then that she hadn't before. She placed her hands on the woman's face, and willed the cold to come out, same as when she awoke herself from a long freeze.

_Just think of her body as a part of your own. Pull the cold out._

Nothing happened.

Elsa cursed, closed her eyes, and focused, frozen heart filling with self hate, images of icy battlefields filling her mind, begging the cold to leave this woman so that she could know some peace at last.

_Live, that you might bring me death._

Nothing.

Elsa screamed, smacking her fist against the air and feeling a thousand statues burst into shards, the wind outside wailing in her stead.

She fell to her knees in front of the intruder, the only statue left intact, tears forming in her eyes, reflecting in their fast freezing drops the countless shards of sisters' faces littering the floor, frozen fractals of a shattered childhood radiating out from where she knelt and clutched the legs of the red woman, weeping, begging someone to come and take her, needing the warmth of another's hands around her throat, praying to feel the fire of flesh before the end.

On and on she wept, screams echoing off unfeeling crystal, the snowstorm outside burying the castle in an endless fall of snow. She wept till the self-pity, the guilt, the hate all drained away, till the castle was covered completely. She was a child, and all she'd ever wanted was her sister.

_Anna. Forgive me._


	3. Chapter 3

Melisandre.

Ice-born.

Beloved of R'hllor.

She'd been here before, it seemed. The cold, the calm, the sense of utter stillness.

But there were trolls then, and a red priest. The slaver who stole her and took her away.

Now there was only a woman, weeping.

Why was she weeping?

And why was it so hard to move?

The woman clutched a half-mask, an ice face, a girl Melisandre seemed to know.

R'hlorr's breath on her neck, her chest, the thousand kisses of a resplendent god. Tongues of flame tracing her frame, as it had been two dozen years before.

Her fingers found motion first; her hand reached down to twine in white-blond hair. Blue eyes flicked up in awe, disbelief, eyes emptied of emotion, eyes of the enemy, eyes of...

_Elsa!_

Frozen rivers of memory cracked and flowed. A night in a castle. Noble born.

She fell to her knees, hands clutching the face of this person who could not be, this woman whose eyes were clear with utter madness.

Lips suddenly, on her own, cold and thin, hot breath wicked out through an open mouth. Kisses, gently, down her still-thawing neck, so cold they burned.

Strangled gasps as fingers traced the webwork of her corset, ice-blade nails slashing through the garment like so many severed heartstrings. Teeth, like so many frozen diamonds plunged into her shoulder.

"R'h-" the woman who had called herself Melisandre let out an inadvertent scream. "R'hllor! Consume me! Spare me this-"

Her body spasmed against Elsa's as the enemy straddled her, pinned her down against the ice.

"Oh dear sister. Your god means nothing here. It's all a mad dream, death and blood and no salvation."

Melisandre began to weep, tears steaming. Elsa shook her head, smile wide, eyes wild.

"Let it go."

"Why didn't you come for me, in the tomb?"

Tears like little hailstones fell, collected atop the red dress.

"I used to pretend... little snow Annas. Father hated them... then the storm hated father. I... they called me a witch, Anna..."

"Just games. The magic was just a game, that's all."

Elsa collapsed atop her sister. "I never meant to... They just wouldn't stop..."

Melisandre stroked her sister's hair, melting for the first time the snow crystals scattered throughout, summoning a sigh from the shattered sorceress.

"People hate. Ignorance kills. Oh R'hllor!" Melisandre's eyes steamed and smoked as she clutched the ice queen, melting the dress with the heat of her embrace. "It was you all along. You did come."

Elsa clutched her face in confusion, as tears began to stream, to steam.

"The Fire, the Ice: it's all in you. It always was. Fill me, R'hllor, as you did when I was young."

Elsa's eyes became the blue at the center of a flame, the blue of far-off stars, and she bit down on her lip as hot fingers tore at the red dress, reaching through the folds, pressing through the folds...

"Oh God!" Melisandre's back arched, ice splitting beneath her. "My God."

Thunder rocked the castle, and lightning lit the lovers. The storm raged on and on, and hot rain pounded the sheets of raw ice.


End file.
